Can Fertility Drugs Make Your Kid Short?

PUBLISHED ON 06/26/2012

Fertility drugs will help you get pregnant faster, but they also might make your children shorter. A new study presented at The Endocrine Society's Annual Meeting in Houston, Texas, found that of babies born full term, those that were conceived through fertility drugs were a little bit shorter than naturally conceived children, but were overall healthy.

Experts in this study wanted to see the difference between mothers who used fertility drugs and those who had undergone fertility treatments like IVF. Previous studies have shown that IVF children were actually taller than naturally-conceived children. This time around, the researchers looked at 84 children conceived with the help of fertility drugs and 258 children who were conceived naturally — all of them were born full term. It was found that the kids conceived through fertility drugs were an average of two centimeters shorter — even when the researchers took parents' height into consideration. They also found that the height difference was greater in boys than it was in girls.

Researchers are still unsure what could be the cause of these findings and need to investigate further.

Do you think fertility drugs could affect height? Is having a tall kid important to you?